Running Gqrx on the Raspberry Pi is still very experimental. I strongly recommend that you start with a fresh installation of Raspbian on the MicroSD card. Once you have seen it work you can experiment with different setups and let us know how it works.

It has been reported that using the HDMI audio results in unstable, stuttering audio output. We recommend using the headset jack instead, please see here about switching.

Installation instructions

See the included readme.txt

Device support

Running Gqrx on the Raspberry Pi is still experimental and a compromise at best. You should not expect the same performance as on a high end PC.

The table below should give you an idea of what kind of performance you can expect using the default settings. Note that these tests were run using the v2.6 packages and may not be accurate for v2.9.

Device

Raspberry Pi 2

Raspberry Pi 3

Rtlsdr

Works up to 1.44 Msps

Works up to 2.4 Msps

Airspy R2

Doesn’t work

Use 2.5 Msps and input decimation ≥ 4

Airspy Mini

Doesn’t work

Use 3 Msps and input decimation ≥ 8

HackRF

Doesn’t work (USB power?)

Works at 2 Msps

RFSpace SDR-IQ

Doesn’t work well (FTDI?)

Works up to 111.111 ksps

RFSpace Cloud-IQ

Works up to 256 ksps

Works up to 614 ksps

RFSpace NetSDR

Not tested (need hardware)

Funcube Dongle Pro

Works

Funcube Dongle Pro+

Works but sometimes with crackling audio

Red Pitaya

Not tested (need time)

In most cases you can reduce the CPU load further by reducing the window size, sample rate, FFT rate and FFT size (try 2048 at 10-15 Hz).

If you are only interested in the FFT, set Mode to “Demod Off”. This will greatly reduce the CPU load.